“It should be no surprise that so many of them are going belly-up,” said John Davidson, director of health policy for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, on the latest edition of the Watchdog Podcast. “The rules that they put on these co-ops almost set them up to fail.”

For starters, the co-ops were barred from hiring anyone who had served at an executive level at any health insurance company in the country.

How brilliant! No one who knew what they were doing was permitted to be in charge.

It turns out, the saga of the failed Obamacare co-ops is not over. Above and beyond all the other financial damage caused by this liberal brain-child, the Treasury is now missing over a billion dollars. As the Washington Times reports,

Obamacare’s failed health co-ops could be leaving taxpayers with a massive, unpayable IOU.

A new report released Thursday found that the co-ops, once seen as a key part of the president’s national health care law, have not repaid a single dollar of the combined $1.2 billion they received in federal loans, and Senate Republicans are arguing that the U.S. Treasury will never be made whole.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the administration extended $2.4 billion in start-up and solvency loans to 23 nonprofit plans that were supposed to empower consumers and offer an alternative to big corporate players in the new marketplace.

With many trillions of dollars in debt and many times that amount in unfunded liabilities, I suspect that many politicians think a mere $1.2 billion is no big deal.

It adds up.

The failed Obamacare co-ops are an instance of a broader principle: the government has no advantage over private entrepreneurs at figuring out consumer demand and how to meet that demand. The primary difference between politicians and private entrepreneurs is that the former puts taxpayer money at risk while the latter only risks the money of people who agree to that risk. As a result, politicians using taxpayer money are far more likely to make bad business decisions. The price of failure is practically non-existent to the decision makers.

Joe Scudder is the "nom de plume" (or "nom de guerre") of a fifty-ish-year-old writer and stroke survivor. He lives in St Louis with his wife and still-at-home children. He has been a freelance writer and occasional political activist since the early nineties. He describes his politics as Tolkienesque.